Throughout this book, we will be discussing web clipping as more of a design philosophy. Today, content providers are realizing that it is simply not enough to create a web page for a desktop computer user with a fast Internet connection and a 17" monitor. They are beginning to understand that the Internet is now being accessed by a myriad of devices, both large and small. With this explosion of different Internet-enabled devices comes the task of producing content that works as effectively on a handheld computer as on a desktop PC.
We feel that web clipping presents an excellent design philosophy and technology to develop optimized content for handheld computers. The concepts and techniques shown in this book, while not directly applicable, could also be used to help design web applications for other classes of mobile computing devices, such as wireless phones and Web pads.
Periodically throughout this book, you will see the term PQA, query applications, web clipping applications, or WCA. Throughout the Palm VII's development, web clipping applications were called Palm Query Applications. Over time, the term web clipping took on greater importance and Palm Computing decided to call PQA's web clipping applications. Palm has recently begun abbreviating this term as WCA. In this book, we will use the terms web clipping applications, web clipping apps, query apps, PQAs, and WCAs interchangeably.
You can think of a web clipping application as a mini-web site residing in the Palm organizer's memory. There are a number of benefits, as well as drawbacks, to storing this mini-web site locally. For instance, access to the application is instantaneous, as there is no need to go over-the-air to retrieve the first page of your application. This has the benefit of saving the user time and money. On the other hand, a web clipping application is static and cannot be updated like a traditional web site. If you ever update your application, you will need users to download and install your updated app onto their devices. We discuss this issue in further depth in Chapter 9 on publishing your applications.
Todays wireless handheld computers and phones do not have high speed connections to the Internet. Because of this, the current way of displaying content on the Internet, large hulking pages with colorful graphics and animations, simply does not work on the limited bandwidth shared by these mobile computing devices. Your top priority when designing web clipping applications is to balance the limitations of today's technology with the needs of your users.